After a sluggish performance in the first half of the year and a prevailing mood of fiscal malaise over the past two years, America’s economy is showing signs of resurgence.

Yes, President Bush’s controversial post-election tax cut, while popular with the voters, has made the US budget surplus disappear.

But consumer confidence is increasing, the stock market is inching upwards and home sales have surged.

By contrast, the big economic news in Europe this week was that EU member states have finally agreed on a plan to open their electricity and gas markets to competition by…drum roll, please…2007!

Now, don’t pop open the Champagne just yet. Because in 2006 the European Commission will have to publish a report on the effectiveness of liberalisation that could provide an escape route for countries that don’t want to go through with it.

The most likely culprit is France, which has led the effort thus far to block market-opening and, along with Germany, insisted on the delay.

Translation: “Let them eat cake which has been baked in an oven requiring unnecessarily expensive gas.”

You can’t blame Paris for being skittish when it comes to the free market. Even words that rhyme with privatisation or liberalisation – and there are a lot of them in the French language – can incite a work stoppage.

This week it was French truckers, who made what must have seemed to somebody like a reasonable demand: they wanted a 13th month of pay.

To a worker just about anywhere in the world this demand sounds completely absurd.

But maybe I’ve been in Europe for too long, because my first reaction was, “Why shouldn’t French truckers get the same deal that everybody else does?”

However, even these lorry drivers sense a need for change.

Their blockades, according to news reports, were half-hearted. For one thing, they let people through.

Also, the ‘right-wing’ French government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin exploited divisions among the unions and used some old-fashioned police muscle to keep things moving.

By the end of the first day some of the hauliers were even seen wearing J’§ J (for Jean-Pierre) T-shirts.

Things got a bit more serious on Tuesday, when thousands of striking public-sector workers created havoc around France in protest against the government’s economic plans.

More work-stoppages may be on the way, but credit Raffarin for ignoring the fate of the last conservative government in France, which collapsed in 1997 after widespread labour unrest had crippled the country.

Perhaps this time around, instead of blaming a government looking to spur growth, voters will point the finger at a public-sector Leviathan looking after itself and its pension funds at the expense of everybody else.

I know who I would hold accountable if my travel plans were ruined or I couldn’t get to the hospital because of a roadblock.

Voters in Germany have figured out exactly who to blame, too – unfortunately they are a couple of months too late.

Economic reforms are desperately needed in a country where the only things growing are tax bills and, at an even faster rate, anger at Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

The wily Social Democrat survived a tough re-election battle in September by promising economic reform without painful budget cuts or tax hikes.

But it now turns out there will be both.

Schröder is not just under fire from political opponents, he’s also a laughing stock.

The number-one pop song in the country is a parody of the dance hit The Ketchup Song. In The Tax Song, a Schröder impersonator sings: “Dog tax, tobacco tax, car and environmental tax.

“Did you really believe there wouldn’t be more?”

It may not be as catchy as “aserejè ja de jè de jebe tu de jebere seibiunouva majavi an de bugui an de buididipi”, but it’s hitting home.

Few people take seriously the EU’s plan to make Europe “the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010”.

Fonctionnaires can barely recite those words without sniggering.

Critics see this so-called Lisbon Process, with its labour reforms and market-opening, as a lame attempt to give Europe an American economic makeover.

But the EU doesn’t have to ‘beat’ the US at its own game – or even emulate its more capitalist tendencies in order to spur European growth.

Its leaders – especially in France and Germany – just have to be bold and imaginative.